


Let’s Get Cooking!

by Mertens



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux, Phantom of the Opera (2004), Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cooking, Creampie, F/M, Just Married, quarantine fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:47:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23658592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertens/pseuds/Mertens
Summary: Erik and Christine get up to some naughty kitchen fun!
Relationships: Christine Daaé/Erik | Phantom of the Opera
Comments: 20
Kudos: 93





	Let’s Get Cooking!

It was supposed to be the second week of their honeymoon, but unfortunately it was also the second week of the quarantine. Erik and Christine had been visiting Madame Giry when the government order had been announced, and just like that their trip around the world had been canceled and, with the opera house closed down, they didn’t have anywhere else to go. 

It wasn’t so bad, sharing the house with her and Meg - it was a big house after all. But it was awkward sometimes. The newlywed couple wanted to do... other things, than just sit and play board games with Girys or binge watch Netflix. These other things were often incompatible with the situation they found themselves in, but that certainly didn’t stop them from trying. 

Christine glanced at the glowing clock on the microwave - 10:30pm. She chewed her lip. It was late, but she didn’t want to go to bed. A rustle was heard behind her, and she turned and looked. It was Erik, and the gleam in his eye informed her that he too had something on his mind other than sleep. 

“We shouldn’t be in here,” Christine whispered, grinning. “Giry said not to go in the kitchen past ten!”

“Giry isn’t here right now...”

“She might hear us!”

“That makes it all the more exciting, doesn’t it?” 

She giggled as he pulled her close, hugging her. 

“Besides... I have something for you,” he murmured in her ear. 

“Oh?”

“Mm hmm.”

“What is it?”

“I had wanted to give it to you on our honeymoon, but...” he trailed off, a little wistfully. “I’ll give you a hint - it starts with a ‘C’ and ends with a ‘K’...”

She narrowed her eyes, thinking she knew what it was, and she couldn’t wait for him to give it to her. 

“Turn around,” he told her. 

She turned around and looked down - he was already holding it in his hands. She gasped. It was bigger than she remembered it being. 

“This for you, and only you,” he told her tenderly. 

His grandmother’s handwritten cookbook. 

Erik had had a terrible relationship with his mother, but when she had kicked him out as a young teen, his grandmother had taken him in. She had cared for him, and taught him both cooking and music to help ease his anger towards the world. Christine knew how important she had been to him, and just how much this cookbook meant to him. 

“Oh, Erik!”

He had cooked a recipe from this book for her on their first serious date, and she had watched how he had treated the book with such care. To be entrusted with it now - it was like being entrusted with every last piece of his heart, of his soul. 

“What would you like to try first?” he asked as he handed her the book. 

She set it on the counter and flipped through the pages, stopping on a recipe for a chocolate cream pie. 

“This one?” he asked. 

She nodded. 

“It sounds good.”

He went to the pantry to start gathering ingredients. 

“Erik! We can’t- not now,” she hesitated. “We’ll be too loud!”

“I can be perfectly quite.”

“I’ll be too loud, then!”

“Then we’ll just have to find a way of keeping you quiet,” he smirked, and as she opened her mouth to protest, he slipped half a bar of chocolate between her lips. 

She huffed, but was thankful for the treat. 

“Are you sure this ok?” she said around a mouthful of chocolate as she set the temperature on the oven. 

“Of course.”

Christine wasn’t so certain - Madame Giry had said she didn’t want anyone cooking after 10pm, not after Christine had accidentally set the fire alarms off at midnight last week while trying to make French toast. She glanced nervously at the clock again. 

“You’re really going to cook a cream pie? At this hour?”

“Indeed.”

She wrapped her arms around herself and watched as he prepared the dough for the crust. 

“You’re just... really gonna roll that out and put it in my oven?”

Erik paused. 

“Your oven?”

She tilted her head back. 

“After the amount of of time I spent cleaning it yesterday, you better believe it’s mine now!”

Erik chuckled quietly. There had been an incident with a pan of baked macaroni and cheese the previous day, and since it had been Christine’s idea to make the dish, she had offered to clean the oven after the cheese had suddenly exploded. 

He moved from the counter to pull her into another hug, nuzzling his masked nose against her neck as he spoke. 

“You’re absolutely right, Christine - I’m going to roll out that dough, press it down into the pan, then stick it in your oven... But only for fifteen minutes, because then we need to take it out and put foil around the edges to keep it from getting burnt.”

Christine moaned. She hadn’t had a dessert since her wedding cake... And no matter what Meg said, Jell-O Pudding cups didn’t count as dessert. 

“Help me measure the flour,” he kissed her neck once before returning to the food. 

She reached a plastic measuring cup into the big bag of flour, and was about to pour it into the mixing bowl when suddenly the cup slipped out of her hand and fell to the floor, spilling flour everywhere. 

“Oh, _fuck_!” she cried, tears forming in the corner of her eyes as she stared at the wasted flour. 

As a child, she and her father had not had the most luxurious life... Though he had tried his best to shield her from such worries for as long as could, she knew that there had been more days than not that he wasn’t certain where their next meal would come from. It had taken her a long time after their situation had changed to stop being so peculiar about food - not eating “too much” at one sitting, waiting until she was nearly faint with hunger until she ate her next meal, eating things far past their expiration date because she didn’t want to “waste” them. She had thought she was doing good so far during the quarantine, and though Erik and the Girys made certain that she was eating often enough, she had begun to feel that familiar old strain in the back of her mind. 

Erik took in the image of his wife nearly crying over the ruined flour and knew immediately what was wrong. 

He placed a comforting hand on her back. 

“It’s alright, Christine,” he soothed. “There’s plenty of flour left for the recipe, and plenty left over even after that. There’s more than enough food for all of us in the pantry to last through the quarantine, and there’s going to be plenty in the stores when we do go out again.”

She nodded and took a deep breath, trying to tell herself that he was right. She got out a new measuring cup and, with steadier hands this time, sifted the flour into the mixing bowl. 

They managed to finish the crust and get it in the oven without alerting the household. While it was baking, she read ahead in the cookbook as Erik swept the floor. She poured all the ingredients together, but she handed the whisk to Erik - she was afraid she’d spill something again. Still, she stayed close and watched as the milk and the chocolate and eggs were stirred together over the stove. 

Her brow crinkled. He was stirring slow and steady, and it was taking forever for the ingredients to melt together. 

“Faster, Erik, faster!” she urged. 

“Like this?” he began stirring faster. 

“Yes!”

He kept up the pace until it was finished. He knew just how she liked it - really light and airy. She’d always loved pies like that, as long as he’d known her. 

Once the crust and the filling had both cooled to room temperature, they poured the cream into the pie shell and put the pie in the fridge to cool. 

“Erik,” Christine twisted her hands together. “Could we- could we put it in the freezer so it’ll cool faster and we can have some tonight?”

“It might not taste the same,” he warned, but he took it from the fridge and placed it in the freezer instead. 

They left the kitchen for the living room as they waited for the pie to cool, settling themselves on the couch as they looked through the cookbook together. Erik told her stories about some of the recipes - problems he had run into when trying to make it for the first time, or memories of him and his grandmother having certain dinners. Christine rested her head on his shoulder as he told of the elaborate chicken cordon bleu they had had when he was accepted to a prestigious academy for music, and then of the garlic roast with field vegetables he had made in memory of her the night he was made manager of the opera house. Christine remembered, of course, the chicken wings and prawns he had cooked on their first official date, a date that had felt more like an anniversary considering how close they already were before deciding to make their relationship official. 

And now this chocolate cream pie was added to the list of their personal recipes - it would forever be linked to this time and day, and in the future it would be just another memory of something they had lived through together, something that was in the past. 

She closed her eyes as she rested there in his embrace and listened to him as he talked about potato salad. This wasn’t how she had envisioned spending her honeymoon - this wasn’t how she envisioned spending _any_ time, going through a worldwide pandemic. It was scary, and unexpected, but there was no one she would rather spend her quarantine with than Erik. They would be ok, because they were together. 

Soon it was nearly midnight, and they took the cream pie out and sliced it up and plated it, putting the rest back in the fridge. They sat down at the kitchen table and began to eat. 

“It’s really good!” Christine was surprised. 

“It’s a little frozen,” Erik chuckled. 

“It’s still good,” she took another bite. “Man, Giry would kill us if she saw-“

Madame Giry was standing in the doorway and cleared her throat. 

Christine and Erik turned to look at her, eyes wide. 

Everyone was silent a long moment as Giry saw the evidence that forbidden food had been cooked. The pair at the table braced themselves for reprimands, but all she said, however, was- 

“Get me a plate, too.”

It really was a very good looking cream pie, after all.


End file.
